Toni Morrison
In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she dragged herself off to bed, having spent another day without his presence, her heart beat like a gloved fist against her ribs. And in the morning, long before she was fully awake, she felt a longing so bitter and tight it yanked her out of a sleep swept clean of dreams.Collection: Dream
And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.Collection: Strong
It's always seemed to me that black people's grace has been with what they do with language. In Lorrain, Ohio, when I was a child, I went to school with and heard the stories of Mexicans, Italians, and Greeks, and I listened. I remember their language, and a lot of it is marvelous. But when I think of things my mother or father or aunts used to say, it seems the most absolutely striking thing in the world.Collection: Mother
But maybe a man was nothing but a man, which is what Baby Suggs always said. They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely that was, they studied your scars and tribulations, after which they did what he had done: ran her children out and tore up the house. [...] A man ain't nothing but a man,' said Baby Suggs. 'But a son? Well now, that's somebody.Collection: Love
Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses - young loving.Collection: Age
Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.' Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.Collection: Alive
Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don't get nothing for it.Collection: Mean
She left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing something else. Of itself it is of no consequence to one's major scheme. A hotel room is convenient. But its convenience is limited to the time you need it while you are in that particular town on that particular business; you hope it is comfortable, but prefer, rather, that it be anoymous. It is not, after all, where you live.Collection: Life
I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.Collection: Mean
When they fall in love with a city, it is for forever and it is like forever.Collection: Falling In Love
Lonely, ain't it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.Collection: Lonely
I thought the whole world was like Lorain.Collection: World
When I'm not creating or focusing on something I can imagine or invent, I think I go back over my life - I don't recommend this by the way - and you pick up, oh, what'd you do that for? Why didn't you understand this?Collection: Thinking
I sang "O Holy Night" in a school choir. My mother came and listened to me and complimented me. So that was the high point. I cannot sing a note.Collection: Mother
I couldn't bear to have people mispronounce my name. But the person I was was this person who was called Chloe.Collection: Names
Sometimes the names were humiliating, deliberately so. Somebody would pick out your flaw. If you were little, they would call you Shorty. And if you were angry, they would call you the Devil.Collection: Names
I don't think I knew any of my father's friends - male friends - by their real names. I remember them only by their nicknames.Collection: Father
I don't work. I keep telling people I'm unemployed. And I don't wash dishes, and I don't wash clothes, and I don't clean my house. Somebody else does that.Collection: Clothes
In my mother's church, everybody read the Bible and it was mostly about music. My mother had the most beautiful voice I have ever heard in my life. She could sing anything - classical, jazz, blues, opera. And people came from long distances to that little church she went to - African Methodist Episcopal, the AME church she belonged to - just hear her.Collection: Beautiful
This is really skin privilege, the ranking of color in terms of its closeness to white people or white-skinned people and its devaluation according to how dark one is and the impact that has on people who are dedicated to the privileges of certain levels of skin color.Collection: Dark
I began to realize that this idea of the lighter the better and the darker the worse was really - had an impact on sororities, on friendships, on all sorts of things, and it was stunning to me.Collection: Impact
It was my father who could do no wrong. So I didn't think of it as, oh, look, my father's a violent man.Collection: Father
I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it's much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.Collection: Jobs
One of the monstrous things that slavery in this country caused was the breakup of families. I mean, physical labor, horrible; beatings, horrible; lynching death, all of that, horrible. But the living life of a parent who, A, has no control over what happens to your children, none. They don't belong to you. You may not even nurse them. They may be shipped off somewhere, as in "Beloved" the mother was, to be nursed by somebody who was not able to work in the fields and was a wet nurse.Collection: Country
If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.Collection: About Writing
Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It’s real information, but it tells you next to nothing.Collection: Real
A bestseller is a book that non-book buyers buy.Collection: Book
I don’t believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but they were political, because that’s what an artist is-a politician.Collection: Real
I guess I’m depressed. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. Part of it is the irritability of being 84, and part of it is being not as physically strong as I once was. And part of it is my misunderstanding, I think, of what’s going on in the world.Collection: Strong
I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it’s much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.Collection: Book
I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don’t read them later.Collection: Book
I don’t think I knew any of my father’s friends – male friends – by their real names. I remember them only by their nicknames.Collection: Real
Most of our lives are spent in little towns, little towns all throughout the country. That’s where we live. And that’s where the juices come from and that’s where we made it, not made it in terms of success but made who we are.Collection: Country
I think one of the reasons I’m so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.Collection: Reading